Surveying People—Policing Plants: Recasting Livelihoods in German Samoa

The German colonizers took pride in the experiment of Samoan ‘self-rule’. Paramount chief Mata’afa Iosefo remained in authority, lineages still owned their land collectively—and apart from extensive surveying of every aspect of the Faʻa Sāmoa (the Samoan way of life)—the people were left comparatively unencumbered. Plants and agriculture, however, were subject to direct intervention and control. In every district, a resident was promoted to the rank of ‘plant inspector’. Soon, fines for improper gardening proliferated. In light of recent findings in the social history of surveys and colonial statistics, this arrangement is telling. Based on Samoan archives, I argue that the policing of plants and the surveying of people are two sides of the same coin: the making of a knowledge crucial to liberalism. The extensive collection of data allowed a whole socio-ecology to be recast by scarcely detectable means.

Anna Echterhölter has been Professor for the History of Science at the University of Vienna since 2018. She was an interim professor at the TU and at HU Berlin and has held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and the German Historical Institute Washington. She is acting editor of Science in Context. Research topics include the social history of quantification, metrology, and indigenous law in the Pacific.